The Border Lords

by T. Jefferson Parker

  She smiled slightly. “Hey, Charlie.”

  “Quite the tantrum.”

  “I was always an extrovert.”

  “I’ll bet you were. You’ve got even more to show them, Seliah. Go blow their minds.”

  “You bet I will.”

  “I hope we can bring Sean in, set him up right here beside you.”

  “You know he won’t let you.”

  “I know he loves you more than anything in the world.”

  She looked at him and sighed softly. “Yes. That’s a splendid notion. You are such a good man.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dr. Wong, the anesthesiologist, was short and pleasant-faced. He came to the other side of the bed and said he was going to administer the first dose of ketamine. Later would come infusions of ketamine, midazolam and “propofol not titrated to burst-suppression pattern on the electroencephalogram.” Ribavirin, a rabies antiviral drug, would not be administered, because of delayed and depressed immunological responses noted in previous protocol patients. Dr. Willoughby himself had strongly advised against the ribavirin. Seliah would be intubated for metabolic supplementation as well. She would go into a deep sleep almost immediately. It would be a peaceful sleep. She would not dream and she would not worry. While she slept her immune system would fight the virus with all its strength. The doctor squeezed the powerful drug into the IV feed.

  “Mrs. Ozburn,” he said. “Can you count backward for me, from one hundred? Start at a hundred, Mrs. Ozburn.”

  “Later, Charlie.”

  “We’ll all be here waiting for you.”

  Seliah tapped Hood’s hand with a finger and started counting at one hundred. She stopped at eighty-one and Hood watched her eyelids close.

  Dr. Wong glanced at his watch, then at the vitals monitor. “No one makes it past ninety-two. Not three-hundred-pound men or professional athletes.”

  “She’s an amazing woman.”

  He looked at Hood askance. “There’s nothing more you can do now, Mr. Ozburn. Go home. Try to rest. She’ll be here a long time.”

  Hood stopped at the nurses’ station and introduced himself to the three on-duty nurses. He told them that Seliah’s husband, Sean Ozburn, might surprise them with a visit. He described him. Hood told them he could be intimidating but not to be afraid of him. Do as he asked. Hood told them to call nine-one-one immediately if he showed up here, and to call him as soon as they reasonably could. He gave each one a card with his cell number on it, and left two more to be taped up on the station message board.

  Nurse Marliss Sharer took the card and looked through the glass at Seliah, then back to Hood. She was young and pretty and Hood wondered how Marliss would stack up against the mad power replicating in Seliah’s body.

  “We’ll take good care of her, Mr. Hood. We’re the best around when it comes to therapeutic comas.”

  Hood drove the Interceptor up the ramp from the half-light of the underground entrance into the bright October afternoon. He took the freeway south for Buenavista. He thought about Seliah and how advanced the virus in her was, and he figured if Sean had given it to her, then he must be worse off. Would Sean be more resistant because he outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds? He couldn’t get the image of noosed and thrashing Seliah out of his mind. What could possibly lead someone to give one of humankind’s most horrific diseases to another human, knowing that he would in turn give it to his wife? Who was the real target? What black motive could underwrite such an act?

  The traffic was light and he was through El Centro by early evening. It was cool and clear and the barley and milo and cotton rolled out for miles around him. Then he climbed a few feet in elevation, all it took to bring him into the unforgiving and beautiful desert that would lead him to Buenavista.

  A call came through on his cell and he touched the earpiece control.

  “Marshal Hood, this is Don August. I’m one of the Desert Flyers. We talked a few days back.”

  “You’ve got the strip outside Yuma.” Hood’s heart jumped. If this went where he thought it might go, then his luck was changing.

  “Good memory. Out in Ogilby, right next door to Yuma. Look, I won’t take up much of your time but you asked about Ozburn and he, well, he called about a minute ago and asked if he could use the landing strip. I said okay. He said he’d be coming in soon. I said what’s soon and he said he wasn’t sure. I don’t know if there’s any problem, but I know you work with him.”

  Hood wondered if Ozburn was headed to the Yuma ATF safe house to complete a hat trick. With two of three houses already hit, Hood thought the chances were good. But the North Baja Cartel had moved its young stars out of the Yuma safe house shortly after Ozburn had hit San Ysidro. Hood had watched them pack up and leave on a live feed to the Buenavista field station. Ozburn couldn’t know this for certain, but he’d certainly suspect it. And he’d certainly suspect a Blowdown trap.

  “Tell me exactly where the strip is.”

  “Before I do, I want you to know that the Ozburn I know is a good man.”

  “You’re right about that, Don. Now, tell me where the airstrip is.”

  Hood scribbled notes on one of Seliah’s canvas book bags. He checked his watch—forty minutes from Ogilby if he drove fast. He voice-dialed Janet Bly. She was in the Buenavista field office, half an hour from the Yuma safe house, on her way, over and out. Now feeling solidly in luck, Hood caught Dyman Morris and Robert Velasquez en route to a Quartz gun store, which meant they were about twenty minutes from the Ogilby landing strip. Morris said they’d be there in more like fifteen minutes; then Hood heard the whine of their engine and Velasquez calling Who let the dogs out. Frank Soriana in the San Diego field office ordered Hood to join Bly at the Yuma safe house as fast as humanly possible. If Ozburn was there, detain him. If he wasn’t, park their cars at Smucker Park, two blocks south, then walk back, let themselves into the house, and wait for him. Janet had a key.

  Hood figured he was thirty-five minutes from the safe house if he drove hard. He hit his lights and brights and launched the Interceptor south.

  Velasquez called him twenty minutes later: no aircraft on or around the Ogilby landing strip. He and Morris had their vehicle tucked out of sight under a stand of greasewood and would hold tight.

  Janet called as soon as Hood rang off: She’d cruised the safe house once and it looked unoccupied. She was parked across the street and three houses down, with a good view of it. “There are cars parked all up and down the street,” she said. “Any one of them could be Sean’s. But I’ve been here two minutes and he hasn’t come out. How long would it take him to see that no one’s home—half of that?”

  Eleven minutes later Hood exited the interstate, turned off his lights and headed for the Magnolia Street safe house. He drove slowly, irrationally looking into the western sky across which Ozburn would come from Ogilby, as if Ozburn might descend and land Betty right on the street.

  Hood passed the safe house and saw nothing unusual and no signs of life inside. He remembered the last time he had been there. He was with Sean, helping Velasquez and Bly wire in the surveillence system—three long, hot days of running cable, placing relays, arguing over the best places to hide the cameras and the mikes, building a fake circuit breaker panel to house the controls. Soriana had directed mainly by loitering. Mars had brooded and never lifted a tool. The good old days, thought Hood.

  Bly stepped from her Jeep as Hood pulled up beside her. She shrugged, shook her head, threw out her hands in frustration before he could even get out of the car. When she stepped back he swung open the door.

  “Seliah okay?” she asked.

  “She’s in a world of hurt, Janet.”

  “But is she in the coma?”

  “She’s in the coma.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They’re not saying much.”

  Hood checked the caller and hit the “receive” button.

  “Charlie, Dyman here. Sean just buzzed the s
trip. Yellow Piper Cub, writing under the fuselage, no doubt it’s him. He’s not in our sight now.”

  “Ozburn,” Hood said to Bly, pushing the speaker icon so she could hear. “How good is your cover?” he asked Morris.

  “It’s good. We got the black Ford tucked up behind the trees on the east side of the strip. But I don’t know what he sees from up there. I can’t know that.”

  “If he’s not back in five minutes, he’s seen you,” said Hood.

  “Then he must not have seen us.”

  “Dyman?”

  “Coming back the other way now! There he is, Charlie, yellow as a school bus.”

  “From the east?”

  “Yeah. East. East this time. And what do I got? I got the ass end of the Ford shining in the sun. Here he comes, Charlie, right at us. Man, he’s low. Wings are steady. I can hear him now. Coming at us. Coming right directly at us. Sonofabitchass Ford hanging out of the trees. Oh, man, he’s barely a hundred feet up now. Less! Here he comes. He’s tilting his wings, Charlie. He’s tilting his wings at us! Can you hear him? Can you hear that?”

  Hood listened to the wail of the Piper as it shot over Morris and Velasquez and roared west.

  Hood stared out at the western sky. He opened the door of the Interceptor and let Janet in, then got behind the wheel and shut the door. They sat for a few minutes, eyes up like stargazers.

  Hood saw a small aircraft coming in from the west. It was a speck at first, a bird or a child’s glider. He tapped the window with his finger and Bly nodded. The speck grew into a plane. It was still too far out for Hood to register color but the flat, one-story city around them gave him all the distance his eyes could handle. He had twenty-ten uncorrected vision as a twelve-year-old and still had it. Then the plane was yellow and it was coming on a line for the safe house, and for Hood and Bly.

  “It’s him,” said Bly. “Is he going to strafe it or something?”

  Betty came in at a steady clip and Hood thought of the World War Two movies his father loved. Ozburn buzzed across the sky not much higher than the power poles. Hood pushed his head back against the rest and looked up through the windshield as Betty zoomed over them in one roaring pass. The noise of her engine halved when she went over Hood’s car, and he heard it diminishing as he looked through his window and saw Betty growing smaller in the blue Arizona sky.

  “Think he saw us?” asked Bly.

  “No. Plenty of other cars in this lot. But he saw Dyman—that was enough.”

  Betty shrunk, then vanished. Hood swung open his door and stood looking into the sky. Bly talked with Velasquez on her cell. A few minutes later Morris guided the Explorer into the parking lot.

  “The guy who called in this tip wanted me to know that Ozburn is a good man,” Hood said softly.

  “He was, Charlie; then he cracked.”

  “I feel like we should have seen it coming. Should have done something. We just let him wander off.”

  “Hey, we didn’t put him up to killing five men in six days. Or make him sick. Or make him do crazy stuff.”

  “But we built the stage and put him on it. We thought we could write the story our way.”

  “That’s too philosophical. You overcomplicate. We’re just law enforcers. It’s all we are.”

  Hood had figured on this from Bly but he was already wondering what he would be doing right now if he were Ozburn, if, like Sean, he had worked himself half-crazy during fifteen months undercover among some of the most dangerous people in the world, been purposely infected with a fatal disease, but still felt, truly and deeply in his heart, that there was good he could do on earth and evil he could defeat. And Hood wondered what he’d do if he had a plane and a dog and some guns and a wife to whom he’d innocently given his deadly virus during an act of love, a wife who’d gone into a deep sleep because of it and might not wake up again. If life was a fairy tale, he could just slay a few more dragons and kiss her. That would be enough to bring her out of sleep and they could live happily ever after. Hood wondered when people started telling themselves such stories, and why. The people must have been desperate. The stories were the opposite of helpful. Instead they were flagrantly immaterial and misleading and finally false.

  “I want to write a new story,” he said.

  “You want a happy ending.”

  “It doesn’t have to be happy. Just one where the characters get what they deserve.”

  “We don’t live in fairy tales, Charlie.”

  31

  Ozburn watched the safe house blur and disappear under Betty’s nose. His eyes had started doing funny things to him—bright green tracers and extreme perspectives—but he could still make out the red-tile roof of the safe house and the red gravel yard in front. Later, little amigos, he thought, if you haven’t all run away yet.

  He eased the aircraft into a gentle climb as he pictured the black Ford ATF Explorer parked under the row of greasewood trees back behind him, shiny as a mirror. He thought bitterly of their foolishness and the treachery of Don August. There was probably more ATF near the house itself, he guessed, waiting to intercept the mad-man Ozburn. A curse on them all.

  An hour later he was circling the strip near Jacumba for the third time, seeing nothing but the red pickup truck he’d been told to look for. A few minutes after that Ozburn was touching down Betty to the flat, hard runway.

  It was an old smuggler’s strip, not a hundred yards from the un-fenced border, and he remembered the night, just a couple of years ago, when he and his Blowdown brethren had nailed two gringos with a Beechcraft filled with cash and thirty guns with the serial numbers gouged roughly from their frames. The smugglers were sitting around a small fire on a freezing windy night, smoking dope and waiting for their partners to cross the border with the shipment. Armed with a tip from a good informant, Ozburn and his team had run their vehicles hard through the darkness and rough desert like beings launched from hell, toward the flames of that little fire. The smugglers had simply stood and raised their hands like bad guys in a Western, plumes of breath hanging on their faces. And later Ozburn had entered the strip coordinates on his GPS, for the day when he or one of the Desert Flyers might want to visit Jacumba without paying airport fees or suffering FAA supervision. Good days, thought Ozburn. Days when I believed and acted well. Will there be any more like that?

  He taxied in a wide circle that brought Betty to a stop downwind near the red Dodge Ram king cab. He shut down the engine and climbed out and stood unsteadily. It was like his feet were only half there, like the toes had frozen and fallen off. He marshalled his strength and lifted Daisy from her seat to the ground.

  She ran to Father Joe Leftwich, who sat on the lowered tailgate of the pickup truck, his priest’s clothes traded out for Wranglers and a red yoked cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. His cowboy hat was black and broad. He sat with one boot up on the gate while the other dangled well short of the ground, and he leaned an arm on the upraised knee. He had a toothpick in his mouth. He reached into his pocket and tossed Daisy a small biscuit shaped like a bone.

  “You just see Brokeback Mountain?” asked Ozburn.

  “You try wearing the same clothes every day for thirty years.”

  Leftwich helped Ozburn tie down Betty and he stowed Ozburn’s heavy duffel across the backseats of the extended truck cab. Ozburn squeezed into the driver’s seat and found the control and slid it back. He remembered one of the hundreds of ways in and out of Jacumba, a onetime smuggler’s Mecca. DEA pressure had slowed it down for now, but Ozburn knew Jacumba would get hot again just as soon as law enforcement focused on someplace else.

  Daisy sat in back, upright and alert. Leftwich offered Ozburn a nip from his ancient battered flask, then took one for himself. Ozburn was pleased as always by its flavor and cool temperature. It hit him hard and fast. It wasn’t like other drinks, Ozburn thought. It brought energy and clear thinking and confidence.

  “Nice truck,” said Ozburn.

  “I’m happy to help. And
I have a table for us at Amigos, just as you asked. How is Seliah?”

  Ozburn looked over Daisy’s snout at Father Joe. The priest’s face gave off green tracers. “We’ll talk about that later.”

  “But is everything okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t like the sound of this, Sean.”

  They sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Daisy allowed to join them after Ozburn growled at the manager and Father Joe gave him a fifty-dollar bill. She lay under the table, next to Ozburn’s duffel.

  Ozburn ordered a Tecate and two shots of reposado, Leftwich the same. The waitress brought the drinks and a bowl of water for Daisy. They ordered dinner and when she was gone they toasted with the tequila shots. Ozburn dug two vitamin packs and five aspirin from his pocket and washed them down with beer. Anything to keep the feeling in his feet and the pain from his joints.

  Leftwich watched him. “So you visited the Yuma safe house, did you?”

  “Not quite. They were expecting me.”

  Father Joe regarded Ozburn with his usual optimistic expression. He looked ridiculous in the cowboy hat. “You must have expected that, after your visits to the other two.”

  Ozburn said nothing.

  “Exactly who was expecting you—ATF or the baby assassins?”

  Ozburn sipped the tequila and thought about Seliah. He felt his anger stir. His body was aching more now and he wondered if he should increase his vitamins and supplements again. “It was probably Hood. He’s the most durable of them.”

  “Be very cautious if you try again, Sean. Blowdown will be expecting you, and the sicarios will either be gone or very jittery.”

  “I didn’t ask you here for advice about Yuma.”

  “No, of course not,” said Father Joe. “Just trying to catch up with your busy life, Sean.”